The Birth-Mark Book

The deep sinister crimson of the new directions edition is far too garish for the book'bluntly and aggressively gets across what is, mm, not "subtle" in the book but what the book is already obviously steeped in, soaked in'it reduces the depth of the book to a momentary thin shout, and is far too shiny besides. but what's worst about the new directions edition is that it changes the goodreads subtitle to the unnecessary "essays" and removes from the cover and the first title page the original crucial, layered subtitle of the wesleyan university press edition: "unsettling the wilderness in American literary history." the caption is on its own an argument for rereading, a caption that becomes so much better after you finish the book. the redefinition of wilderness is so good (early America, a wilderness to whom?). removing and recaptioning to "essays" misses the point so stupidly, as if this were an essay collection and not a weaving roving book that is essay, criticism, and poem all at once, that is itself a wilderness to roam about in'the long thickets of quotation, the thorny sort-of-found poetry, the reward/oasis of the ending interview. i bought this book because it was fascinatingly mentioned in an essay i copyedited and fact-checked at my internship this summer, but more urgently because when i was looking at it in the co-op soon after i got my blood on it, as one does, and you can't just abandon a book you soiled, can you. (this point didn't come so naturally when i tweeted about the experience of buying the bloodied book, two months later, which reminded me why i shouldn't tweet about the ~fun shenanigans~ my frequent bleeding get me into, or about frequent bleeding generally.) it's a good book to get blood on: fierce and inquiring, and fierce and inquiring about violence, remote and obscured kinds of violence. not sure how much "violence" crops up in the book, but somehow it's a word that comes to mind.